A Belgian man who pleaded guilty to possessing indecent images of children while on a visit to Manchester in January was last week sentenced to four months in prison.
According to a spokeswoman for Manchester Crown Court, where the miscreant appeared for sentencing on 3 March, Tim Verrydt, 23, of Kappellestraat, Mol, Belgium, …

COMMENTS

Facepalm, big time

No bleating this time about any unfairness. Looks like a fair cop.

One thing though. The people who went to look into his shared folder. No charges for hacking or any of the other computer related acts. Cause you know if there had not been anything bad on the machine and the user who had shared the folder detected the intrusion those people would have been in a lot of trouble.

Also the oh let's look in this folder. No, no close it, I need bleach to clean my eyes. I don't have a lot of sympathy. Well what do you expect if you go looking in strange folders.....

Also if there were over 500 CP pictures why only 16 counts of this?

Also was this just a misconfigured shared folder called itunes or is it a peculiarity of the Itunes app that it allows anyone on the same WIFI as you access to your computer?

And last this as I cannot resist a swing against the extreme pr0n part. Why even bother with those charges? Can you be a paedophille and zoophille at the same time. If so it is good they got him to save all those lambs and foals and baby animals that were at risk...

iTunes sharing

You can turn on sharing of your iTunes library, it then appears automatically in all computers on the same network and they can can stream (not download) your contents. No mad hacking skills involved.

I also look into other's shared libraries all the time in hotels and all the time at work. It's often a source of interesting music. Especially fun at conferences, often I know people by their shares before meeting them in person. Never found anything weird at all.

Did not know that

Technically.....

You are running foul of the Computer Misuse Act. It is against the law to access a resource that you are unauthorised to access. Even if you have a valid username/password or the resource is unprotected you are still in breach of the law.

If you were unlucky enough to accidentally stumble across sensitive information and the owner discovered your intrusion you would be liable.

I guess in these cases the law picks who it wants to prosecute the most.

Surprised that..

the relevant Ass's of America haven't hauled the software company responsible up before the beak for facilitating distribution of copyright material.. you know the same charge that pirate bay are up for...

How is that hacking?

Because we have stupid laws thanks to a decade of puritanical Bliarism and Wacky-Jaquiness

>> If someone shares their stuff, whether deliberately or not, it could hardly be described as hacking to view what was shared.

Change that to "If someone shares their WiFi, whether deliberately or not, it could hardly be described as hacking to use that internet connection." and you'll find that people using the WiFi **HAVE** been convicted for it.

Computer Misuse Act 1990

Fruit of the poison tree

As someone with a fascination for all things legal, this story intrigues me in two ways. First, is the exact nature of the technology that allowed this to happen. Although i have asked the questions, i am not gettin 100% clear answers - and may never do.

Second is a clear difference between UK and US legislatures in this area.

In the US, many cases founder on the doctrine known as "fruit of the poison tree". That is, where a search of an individual, their premises or their property was carried out without sufficient legal justification, any evidence turned up by such a search may be thrown out wholesale by the courts.

Not always: where someone is clearly a rapist, murderer, etc. US judges will look for ways to bring evidence in. But the principle - and the danger - is well known and makes US police that much tighter in their search and chain of evidence procedures.

In the UK, the informal understanding is that where evidence is relevant, courts will seek to find ways to bring it into play. So you have far less protection against improper search in the UK than you do in the US.

Strangely, this approach seems recently to have been reversed in respect of documents turned up in the financial leg of divorce proceedings. Hitherto, courts had been very happy to look at documents turned up by, say, an unlawful search of a partner's computer if they revealed evidence of financial impropriety.

Sorry El Reg

Indeed giving out his address is clearly violation of privacy. Not matter if this man is an offender or not. A little bit of discretion, please. Besides why does such stupid articles regularly creep up in here. This is stuff for local newspapers not El Reg.

Soon the only intersting thing in here will be BOFH.

To the ppl who like to belittle Belgium: You forgot that they also have the best beer in the world. And the best medical research. As fot the chocolates... these are sold of to the swiss.